I also have a HP DL120G7 management server with VMware vSphere 5 Essentials Plus Kit installed. We also have 2 VMware vSphere Storage Appliance licenses.

I'm currently running 10 different VM's including:

2 Domain Controller

An Exchange server

Database Server

2 Terminal Servers

A mix of Desktop VM's for testing

In looking at my VMware support renewal contract and I realized that support for the VMware vSphere Storage Appliance will not be renewed beyond Sep 2018. I was thinking of moving away from VMware because of the cost. We are a small outfit and we set this up less that 4 years ago. Now it looks like we may have to scrap all this and invest more in hardware if we go to VMware vSphere 6 Essentials with VMware VSAN. Its the nearest option that I can find.

I wonder what my options are if I want to Keep all my existing VM machines and keep my existing Hardware. I have room in the host to add more storage and I could alos upgrade the Processors in the host as well. Any one out there in this situation?

Don't forget to make sure your current backup solution supports whatever you are considering moving to. If not, then figure in the cost of what it will take to get your backups in order. The essentials price could be trivial compared to that. Many of the modern VM aware backup solutions support both vSphere and HyperV. Xen is less common but that doesn't mean there aren't solutions for it.
Unitrends added it recently.

With your renewal, is there a way to continue on with the Essentials Plus bundle and not renew support for the VSAs you have? There's some cash you can throw at VSAN, Starwind, etc.

I do know the HCL for vSAN is a little stricter than the HCL for just the base vSphere package, so if vSAN is even an option, I would check the server and components you have against both HCLs to see if going with vSAN would require some type of hardware investment. I would doubt Starwind or one of the other solutions mentioned as vSAN alternatives would require additional hardware investments for HCL requirements but don't know for sure.

I think there are 2 options here. Both options assume new hardware with a hypervisor and virtual SAN of your choice.

1. New servers, hypervisor, virtual SAN, and backup licenses for a DIY cluster.

Or

2. A pre-built solution like StarWind HCA. For just 10 VMs and 4 TB usable you can use our Model S and it should be under $19K for both nodes with Hypervisor, Management, backup software, 3 years of support, and installation assistance included. You can also bring your existing hypervisor & backup licenses to drive the cost even lower.

To elaborate Max's contribution I want to add that basically, you have more various
options here to decide and VMware VSAN is definitely not the one since it is
just an overkill for your small environment.

1)You can remain by VMware as hypervisor but use
StarWind VSAN https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san
for shared and highly available
fault-tolerant storage. StarWind is a perfect fit for you since your 4TB capacity
exactly fits our standard license that saves your budget for sure.

3)Independent of what you choose as hypervisor you
can spawn *nix-based VMs with DRBD, GlusterFS or Ceph and give this storage as
NFS/CIFS or block back to the hypervisor.
That takes some time to be done properly and most probably you should support
this by yourself.

If you choose to change the hypervisor, we have a free V2V conversion
tool StarWind V2V Converter https://www.starwindsoftware.com/converter
that was recently updated and can smoothly migrate your virtual machines from
and to most popular hypervisors.

Don't forget to make sure your current backup solution supports whatever you are considering moving to. If not, then figure in the cost of what it will take to get your backups in order. The essentials price could be trivial compared to that. Many of the modern VM aware backup solutions support both vSphere and HyperV. Xen is less common but that doesn't mean there aren't solutions for it.
Unitrends added it recently.

This is such great advice. Many IT Pros forget about the backup tax that they face when making changes to their environment if they have a legacy backup solution that doesn't provide comprehensive OS protection. How are you currently protecting these VMs - with agents or without?

With your renewal, is there a way to continue on with the Essentials Plus bundle and not renew support for the VSAs you have? There's some cash you can throw at VSAN, Starwind, etc.

I do know the HCL for vSAN is a little stricter than the HCL for just the base vSphere package, so if vSAN is even an option, I would check the server and components you have against both HCLs to see if going with vSAN would require some type of hardware investment. I would doubt Starwind or one of the other solutions mentioned as vSAN alternatives would require additional hardware investments for HCL requirements but don't know for sure.

Yes, this is what I would do too if I was giving the same situation. The fact that he already run VMWare maybe even just renew to a Essentials bundle and then wait until close to 2018 and budget the new storage server.

If you have a remote site and are refreshing hardware you could do a 2 node single socket VSAN, and put the witness at yourDR site on the gen 7. As others have mentioned other VSA's are available (Starwind and HPE).

If you are already on VMware Essential Plus, you are already using one of the best solutions for Virtualization based for 3 servers with 2 CPUs each.

Then you may want to review why some of the other people not into hyper-converged are not using VSA or VSANs.....recently we have been moving off physical servers into more specialized roles like ESXi (or other hosts) for computing power (CPU, RAM), network switches for networking (Ethernet, LAN iSCSI, FC etc), storage devices (SAN, NAS, Software defined storage) for storage.

Lots of server manufacturer have come up with diskless servers that boots ESXi via RAID 1 SD cards. Add more 1Gbps or 10Gbps NIC cards for network redundancy and you have a solved the computing portion.